GLASTONBURY by Leo Burnett London for Shelter

The Promo / PR Ad titled GLASTONBURY was done by Leo Burnett London advertising agency for product: The Housing And Homelessness Charity (brand: Shelter) in United Kingdom. It was released in Jun 2009.

Results and Effectiveness
The house of cards model was seen by thousands of festival-goers and captured the imagination of the media, getting coverage on BBC and various websites.
Overall the campaign led to a 1600% increase in the number of online discussions on homelessness and helped secure several government initiatives to prevent repossession.

Creative Execution
We decided to really drive the message home by taking it to Glastonbury, home to almost 100,000 tents – aka temporary accommodation.
We built a big, lifesize model of a house of cards in a prominent position amongst the thousands of tent dwellers. Attached to the structure was a board displaying the following message:
“Over 79,000 households in the UK are living in temporary accommodation. The housing crisis is real.”

Insights, Strategy & the Idea
Shelter is the housing and homeless charity. Following the 2008 economic collapse, their cause was greater than ever –150,000 households were predicted to be in temporary accommodation by the end of 2009.
We were briefed to create awareness of this.
Our solution was the campaign idea of ‘House of Cards’, a universally recognised metaphor for fragility.
However, there were already a whole range of other good causes out there fighting for the public’s attention, so we knew our idea would have to work harder in order to succeed.